After years of waffling, I’ve come up with a plan for how I’m going to organize and put into albums 15 years of photographs–12 of which are sitting on drives and random computers.
I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned that the 4th grade teacher I aide for owns a scrapbooking company. She holds scrapbooking events every month–at least I think she does–and makes special event invitations. I’ve been talking about this with her for a very long time and we’ve decided that for now, the goal is to get my pictures organized into some semblance of order. Then print, then put into albums.
Decision #1: I’ve decided to use traditional a traditional album. Everyone loves the electronic albums, but I tried it at the beginning of the year. I did very well…day 1. Then I forgot to go back, and I know that’s because all those pictures are hidden from sight on my computer and external hard-drives. I couldn’t handle it if I had boxes and boxes of pictures staring me in the face, so that I would tackle. I hope.
This means I need to start organizing pictures. BORING. I did that all last week for yearbook. Those pictures, too, were all over God’s creation, and I still have to access the ones I have on my old desktop. I have a deadline of next week, so the pressure helps. My plan is to devote my Easter vacation to organizing all my personal pictures, and I’m hoping to wrangle in a few friends to make it a party. We all have thousands of pictures on our computers, and misery loves company, so, why not have a Picture Purging party? Everyone comes over with their laptop/external hard drive/whatever and together we keep each other company while we do what we should have done years ago. Side benefit: crowd sourcing when you can’t decide which picture to keep/print.
Decisions #2: Treat instagram pictures like a completely separate entity. I’m not going to try to mix and match the two. In fact, I’ve gone completely automated when it comes to Instagram. I signed up for a Books to Me subscription and I love it. (Not a paid post–just really and truly love the company.)
Books to Me automatically takes my instagram pictures and puts them in an album. I selected the monthly account, which is $24 per month. I do wish the books came with the instagram caption included, but I can easily write it in on my own, which I plan to do. Being without captions isn’t enough for me to cancel the subscription. Here’s a video that explains the process.
Flush from my subscription ordering and decision making, I reopened my Flickr account and created albums by month and date; events; and vacations. This way, I can store my photos in one spot and send them to be printed with one click. I was so inspired by my lack of procrastination that I got started on organizing right away.
I did one picture.
Love the party idea. And congrats on your picture. It's a start. :)
If I were not moving next week I would crash your party. I too have fifteen years of photos stored across eleventymillion platforms. I have started going through my sugarsync account and trying to pare down the out of focus, the blurry, the duplicates….but it is slow going. Good luck to you!
fyi this is Lisa formerly of Trapped In North Jersey, in the event you are wondering why some stranger is threatening to show up at your house. (You moving your blog inspired me to finally move my own.)
Your posts always make me happy. I read and smile at the screen.
See, I was GREAT at organizing pictures, in print and electronically . . . until my husband left for Iraq and now we had two laptops and two cameras. That was eight years ago, and I haven't organized since. Such a mess and so discouraging . . .
Love this idea and your mad organization skills, Jules! :P I'm in such the same boat (we're going to need an Ark since everyone I know is overwhelmed with pictures.) I'm made myself the goal of two albums by June – one for my oldest DD of her elementary school days and a preschool version for my youngest. I'm not going to worry about chronicling every single thing we did but if I can accomplish this I might as have reached the summit of Mt. Kiliminjaro. Good luck!
Have you looked into chatbooks for your instagram pics? It is a subsription also, but much cheaper and they print the date and caption. Just a thought.